By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — In the recruiting calendar for NCAA volleyball, June 15 is the first day college coaches can contact prospective recruits. On the night of June 14, 2021, Lauryn Bowie received a call from her club coach, Dave Franklin, who was checking to see if she was ready for the madness the next day would bring.
Bowie, then a rising junior at Westerville South High School in Ohio, was skeptical. She told him she expected to hear from some small schools, but that was about it. Franklin knew better.
“He was like, ‘You need to be prepared. It’s going to be insane for you,’ ” Bowie recalled this week.
Sure enough, she awoke the next morning to a barrage of messages, and “that’s when it clicked for me, that I can actually take this to the level that I’ve always wanted to take it to,” Bowie said. “Before then I always just thought I’d end up at a smaller school, somewhere in Ohio or bordering states, but I never thought that I’d be Division I, Power Five material.”
Among those who contacted the 6-foot-2 Bowie was University of Virginia head coach Shannon Wells. They set up a FaceTime call on which Bowie’s mother joined them, as she did on all of her daughter’s recruiting calls.
“My mom sat with me in my room,” Bowie said, “because I was kind of nervous at first to do that by myself. But I vividly remember getting off the phone with Shannon and being like, ‘I’m going to Virginia.’ I just had a great connection with her, and I felt that our conversation came so easy when I first called her.”
Calls with Power Five coaches could be “really nerve-wracking,” Bowie said. “It can be hard to make conversation with them. But it was really easy with Shannon.”
About two months after she first spoke to Wells, Bowie visited UVA. She committed to the Wahoos before heading home to Westerville, a suburb of Columbus. Two years later, she’s 10 matches into her freshman season and has already established herself as one of the Cavaliers’ cornerstones.
Only junior middle blocker Abby Tadder (120) has more kills than Bowie (116) for Virginia (7-3), which opens ACC play Friday night at North Carolina (6-3).
After watching her play last spring, Wells became convinced Bowie would have an immediate impact at UVA. “Little did I know how big of an impact it would be, but I thought for sure she was going to have a chance to get on the court right away.”
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